Many students suffer, but not all

Brenda Branswell, GAZETTE Education Reporter05.22.2012

Véronique Blouin, a student at Collège de Valleyfield, says her paid “extern” position this summer at the Lakeshore General Hospital has been cancelled because of the ongoing students' strike.Peter McCabe
/ The Gazette

“I found myself without a job because of this,” said Cégep André-Laurendeau student Adélie Lussier, whose part-time job during the school year is located inside the LaSalle college.John Mahoney
/ The Gazette

MONTREAL - An “amazing” training opportunity lost. The prospect of juggling a full-time job this summer while finishing CEGEP courses. A huge learning experience in the thick of the strike movement.

Those are just a few of the ways the student strike has affected students at Montreal-area colleges.

Students have been boycotting classes at 14 of the province’s 48 CEGEPs, including all but one of the nine French-language CEGEPs on Montreal Island. They now face the possibility of wrapping up their current semester in August and September – a scenario that would presumably affect Grade 11 students heading to those CEGEPs next fall.

The Gazette spoke to some students lasts week about how the strike has affected their lives:

Véronique Blouin, 26

Nursing student at Collège de Valleyfield

This is Blouin’s second experience with a student strike at CEGEP. “I find it hell because I was in school in 2005 when there was the first student strike (over cuts to bursaries),” said Blouin. “I was affected by that. I decide to return to study and I’m still affected by it.”

Three weeks ago, she learned her paid “extern” position this summer at the Lakeshore General Hospital had been cancelled because of the ongoing strike, Blouin said. She was supposed to work in the hospital’s emergency room – an opportunity she called “amazing.” For nursing students at CEGEPs, this training opportunity is available to them once they’ve successfully completed their second year. “We’re twinned with a nurse. It’s excellent for practice – to develop our techniques more that we don’t necessarily have time to practice in our courses,” Blouin said.

Instead, she’ll be working as a patient attendant at the Lakeshore. “It’s stuns me because I wanted to advance,” she said of the lost opportunity. Instead of looking after basic care and hygiene, an extern position includes many things such as taking blood and giving medication, Blouin said. “We help a nurse. It’s a nursing job.”

Blouin has been able to continue her nursing training during the strike, but instead of finishing her exams this month, she’ll be done on June 18. The exams also have to be corrected and the marks issued, she said.

Nursing students from John Abbott College are starting their extern posts at the Lakeshore in mid-June “since they weren’t on strike.” Blouin doesn’t blame the hospital, which said it can’t turn things upside down for two students when it has 20 or 25 who start at the same time. The hospital was sympathetic and offered her an orientation as a patient attendant in the ER, starting this week, she said.

School is something you have to pay for, Blouin said. “It’s not by going demonstrating in front of Air Canada that they’ll give me a trip. Or I can’t go protest in front of Toyota. They won’t give me a free car. We have to pay for what we want.”

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Adélie Lussier, 22

Second-year student at Cégep André-Laurendeau

“I found myself without a job because of this,” said Lussier, whose part-time job during the school year is located inside the LaSalle college. She works at the school’s co-op, which sells textbooks and supplies.

Lussier needs to complete two courses to finish her studies at Cégep André-Laurendeau, where students have been on strike since Feb. 29. She is studying in the trilingualism and cultures program and wants to eventually work in the field of video games. She is supposed to study at Université de Montréal at the beginning of September and said she is “very nervous” about the situation. Cégep André-Laurendeau had already announced that the current semester would have to be extended into August even before the Quebec government introduced a special law this week to suspend the semester at the CEGEPs and universities where classes have been disrupted by the dispute and have classes resume in August. The possibility of classes in August is worrisome for her because she’ll still be working at her summer job at La Ronde, which pays for her studies, Lussier said. “I can’t really miss my work.” If she has confirmation that the university will let her start after her CEGEP semester, it will be reassuring “and one less thing to worry about,” Lussier said.

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Mireille Tremblay-Caron, 17

Grade 11 student at École FACE

Tremblay-Caron plans to study theatre next fall at Cégep Saint-Laurent and has already visited the college for an orientation session. “We don’t know when we’ll start. The teachers don’t know, either,” said Tremblay-Caron. She said she isn’t worried and strongly backs the student movement. For her, if they start in September or January, “it doesn’t bother me because I know that all that we’ve done creates consequences. It’s normal that we would be affected by it, us too at high school.” Tremblay-Caron said she will live with those consequences and everyone in the student movement will adapt. She added that she is confident a solution will be found.

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Alexandre St. Onge-Perron, 21

Social science student and spokesperson for student association at Collège Montmorency

St. Onge-Perron has been anything but idle at Collège Montmorency, where students have been on strike since March 13. St. Onge-Perron said he puts in eight-to 12-hour days organizing student demonstrations and working on other strike-related activities. He says the strike is a major learning experience. He’s learned about how to organize student assemblies and done radio and television interviews. The practical experience is “as good as my courses, if not more,” he said.

The experience is also making him reflect on his future. He had been thinking of studying law or economics at university, but now is considering industrial relations or communications.

Completing the current semester in August, if classes resume, would be the worst idea, he said, predicting a lot of students would drop out. “The semester has already been cut in two. I don’t think it should be cut in three.”

While free education – accompanied by a “good” system of loans and bursaries – is his ideal, St. Onge-Perron believes that won’t happen. “We have a government that is raising our tuition rates.”

“But I think we can get involved to reduce that hike in tuition fees as much as possible.”

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